Whose 250th Is This Anyway?

Hey, have you heard about one of the marketing slogans Boston planners floated for that city’s slate of 2026 birth of the nation events?

“The Revolution started here,” Beantown’s boosters say. “Philly just did the paperwork.”

Booyah. For those of us who grew up with a deep disdain for the Celtics, it’s a traumatic diss. And what has been the response of our tough, blue-collar town — without whom, one could argue, we might still be subjects of the crown?

Listen to the audio edition here:

Uh, kinda crickets. No “Yo, Boston! We got yer paperwork right here,” complete with a prime-time TV reading of the Declaration of Independence on the Art Museum steps by, say, Questlove, Quinta Brunson, and, I don’t know, Pink?

Don’t get me wrong. Philly has a year of great parties planned, with neighborhood get-togethers, World Cup soccer, baseball’s All-Star Game, the NCAA college basketball tourney. But what’s missing, in these times of national torment, is something to reverberate through the decades to come in a way that stirs the civic soul. Something that reestablishes Philly as the nation’s center of Enlightenment values. You know: Here, we double down on justice, tolerance, truth, and unbridled exploration. That’s the role we played for the country’s 100th anniversary, when Philly’s Centennial Exhibition shaped the national zeitgeist by celebrating American ingenuity and entrepreneurialism.

“The farmer saw new machines, seeds and processes; the mechanic, ingenious inventions and tools, and products of the finest workmanship; the teacher, the educational aids and system of the world; the man of science, the wonders of nature and the results of the inventions of the best brains of all lands,” wrote James McCabe in The Illustrated History of the Centennial Exhibition.

That was long before the advent of the Philly Shrug. Fast-forward 100 years: In 1976, the city threw a party and hardly anyone showed up, after Mayor Frank Rizzo, mystifyingly, spoke darkly of danger in the streets and calling in the National Guard.

Until recently, some of us feared we were heading for a reprise of that debacle, thanks to eight years of inattention by the perpetually gloomy Mayor Jim Kenney. But Mayor Cherelle Parker (pushed by Councilmember Isaiah Thomas) and a group of civic leaders have stepped up to save what could have been an embarrassment. They deserve credit, but there’s still one looming question: Can we do something bold that once again models for a desperate country how to come together as a nation?

Where we were

Let’s look back at how we got here. As chronicled by David Murrell in a 2022 Philly Mag piece, nearly 15 years ago investment banker Andrew Hohns, a civic innovator who founded Young Involved Philadelphia, started agitating for a 2026 plan that would shape Philadelphia for decades to come. He envisioned investments that would grow the city and change its national image. Hohns founded the nonprofit USA250 and enlisted first local historian and former mayoral candidate Sam Katz and then former Mayor and Governor Ed Rendell to helm the ambitious project. Problem was, 2026 was so far off; many thought there were more pressing problems deserving immediate attention.

Early in President Trump’s first term, the government formed the federal U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, the official body tasked with planning the celebration. In short order, America250, as it was called, started making all the wrong types of news. There was infighting, allegations of shady side deals, and sexual harassment charges. Hohns, who was on the federal commission, stepped down in protest. Soon, it became clear that cities like Boston, New York, Charleston, and especially Washington, D.C. — now that President Trump, with his “Triumphal Arch,” has seen its marketing value — would all be competing to own the nation’s birthday.

It’s not just about quantifying economic impact, or maximizing visitors, or throwing grand parties, even though all those things are cool. It’s also about restoring a sense that Philly can once again do big things.

Meanwhile, USA250, renamed Philly250, went small ball, focusing, as one civic leader told me, “merely on block parties.” Yes, there were some exciting, headline-making draws, like the FIFA World Cup games and, as Hohns had lobbied for, the Major League Baseball All-Star Game. But there wasn’t much that fit the vision of boldly using the anniversary to rebrand Philadelphia on the world stage, as the Centennial celebration had done.

It was, in contrast to the ambitious ethos of our founding, an example of the incremental thinking that has come to be modern Philadelphia’s curse.

But a green shoot emerged last year when a group of yes-minded civic leaders stood up to do something about it. Among them were Visit Philly CEO and Citizen Media Group board member Angela Val and Philadelphia Visitor Center CEO Katherine Ott Lovell — a pair who have come to be called the Laverne and Shirley of 2026 event planning.

Things began happening. In early 2025, Philly250 was folded into Ott Lovell’s portfolio at the Visitor Center as Philadelphia250, with Rendell as its chair. Gregg Caren and Maria Grasso at the Convention and Visitors Bureau stepped up as well. And Parker rose to the challenge. In 2024, she named nonprofit executive Michael Newmuis the City’s 2026 director; now there was someone in city government waking up every day and thinking solely about how Philly could capitalize on the 250th. There were also now millions to spend from city coffers — the result of Thomas’s 2024 hearings on the lack of planning for 2026, hearings that pressured Parker into coughing up funds. (Even with all this, though, there were critics, including Hohns, who thought the City was simply too late to the game.)

Meanwhile, the Connelly Foundation put together a group of philanthropic funders for the effort, including the William Penn and Comcast foundations. The $16 million Philadelphia Semiquincentennial Funder Collaborative — which now has seven founding philanthropies — would underwrite innovative plans to mark the 250th. For a city and region long characterized by siloed civic investment efforts, it modeled the power of philanthropic collaboration.

The result? The Wall Street Journal named Philly the world’s number one place to visit in 2026. We have a potential tourism bonanza, a total estimated economic impact north of $700 million, and a solid roster of events and programming throughout the year. Under the leadership of Ott Lovell, to cite just one example, the Visitors Center has amassed an army of “Phambassadors” — everyday Philadelphians charged with helping the city and region put our best foot forward when company shows up.

The downside, still? Scant programming that lives on after 2026 to stir and shape the civic soul. The 250th is an opportunity to create new institutions that will grow the city — as Atlanta had done following the 1996 Olympics and as Philly had done before. Past American birthdays, after all, have given us the Mann. Music Center, the African American Museum, the Please Touch Museum, and FDR Park, to name just a few.

But that doesn’t mean it’s too late to add some substance to the 2026 sizzle, as some loosely connected local patriots have been trying to do.

A monument to democracy?

It’s tempting to characterize Rendell as our resident lion in winter, but when it comes to 2026, he’s been a dog with a bone. He has raised $5 million for an idea he calls the National Light — a permanent, interactive, domed monument to democracy. At a time when civics and civility are imperiled, Rendell has imagined something that’s part museum and part public square, an illuminated civic space in Center City with curated, interactive content. Something that returns us to democracy’s roots, when Athenians debated civic issues in public assemblies.

I spoke to him recently, right after he’d read Walter Isaacson’s new book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, a chronicle of the 10-day collaborative editing done by Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin on the text of what would become the Declaration of Independence. Rendell ties the disunity of this moment to the fact that so few know about that one. Philadelphia250 has done polling. They found that most of the country doesn’t even know this is our national birthday. In fact, most of the country — like our city — knows very little of civic import, period.

“Our polling shows that less than 30 percent of Philadelphians have any idea what Martin Luther King Jr. said in his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech,” Rendell told me. “They know it was a great speech. Well, at the National Light, you could see it in context, get questions answered in real time, debate the message.” Had his vision come to life, he added wistfully, “it would have been great.”

For a time, it looked like it would happen. Rendell had hired designers, and the City even provisionally greenlit a site for his idea — the renovated, spaceship-like Fairmount Park Welcome Center at LOVE Park.

“Sometimes we let the perfect be the enemy of progress,” Gould said. “And I wish Philadelphia could be a little more welcoming to risk.” — the Sixers’ David Gould

But Parker mysteriously rescinded it last July. To hear her tell it, all told, Parker has invested in excess of $100 million in our 2026 celebration, though others say that number is a little misleading, given that it includes expenditures on non creative items like new cars for the city’s Department of Fleet Services, training for cops, and new crowd control barriers. The actual investment in content may be more like $75 million, they argue. Either way, Rendell’s idea ran up against all that spending. He needed another $10 million, at the very least, but the well dried up.

Others suspect that it might not have helped that Rendell was such a fervent backer of Rebecca Rhynhart against Parker in the 2023 mayoral primary. Still others say that getting his project built wasn’t the issue; the real question was who would maintain and run it once the power of Rendell’s watchful eye was no longer on it?

“I’m very sad,” Rendell told me from his East Falls home. “Sad for us. Because no other city has come up with anything better. If I was still governor, I would have given Philadelphia $30 million and said, Go come up with something that owns this nationally and changes Philadelphia’s direction, because America needs a new revolution — and it should start here.”

It’s an argument he made to the current occupant of his old office in Harrisburg; the state budget allocates $40 million to the 250th, but that’s spread out among the Commonwealth’s 67 counties. Yet the revolution happened here, Rendell argues. Sure, Luzerne County should have a parade — but leave that to the locals. “Why would you give $500,000 to a county that had no people living in it in 1776?” he wonders. He won’t share precisely what he said to Governor Shapiro, but it’s not hard to discern what Rendell’s political advice might have been: Focus on what you can own—particularly when you’re making a national name for yourself.

“Josh is doing a terrific job and I support him,” Rendell told me. “But he’ll too often take the safe route. You’ve got to have some political moxie.” As for Parker, Rendell said she was afraid to spend more money. “In business,” he told me, “there’s a saying: You have to spend money to make money.”

There’s talk that Rendell’s National Light might end up inside the Constitution Center, which is fine, I suppose, even if it smacks of a half-assed compromise. But there’s better news, at least, in that our 82-year-old former guv isn’t the city’s only would-be 2026 change agent.

Rendering of National Light at LOVE Park. Photo courtesy ESI Design/NBBJ.

Andy Toy, a city worker who heads the Philadelphia Policy Forum and sits on the Philadelphia250 board, called me over the summer, when the 40th anniversary of the groundbreaking Live Aid concert was underway. Why don’t we revisit that, he suggested — only this time it’s called “Democracy Aid” and instead of fighting famine in Africa, the proceeds go to civic-minded nonprofits right here? I hooked him up with legendary rock impresario and Live Aid producer Larry Magid, who rightly pointed out that not only would Toy need millions to secure the type of national acts he was targeting, but the moment probably wasn’t right for a democracy rally. In these crazy times, sad to say, being pro-democracy has come to be seen as somehow partisan.

But Magid remembered that he’d once helped produce one of Norman Lear’s Declaration of Independence Road Trips — featuring celebrities like the late Rob Reiner dramatically reading aloud the words of our revolutionary founding. Could something like that be the answer to Boston’s throwing of shade?

It’s not too late. I’ve talked to countless folks — people who build things — and they’re still cooking up plans for 2026 and beyond. Despite Magid’s misgivings, Toy is still dreaming of some type of ambitious concert. Another entrepreneur pointed me to a Boston (there’s that damn city again) art collective called Silence Dogood (an homage to one of Ben Franklin’s pseudonyms) that has been projecting lighted Revolutionary War messages — quotes from

Thomas Paine, for example — in vintage-style typefaces on buildings throughout the city.

“If I was still governor, I would have given Philadelphia $30 million and said, ‘Go come up with something that owns this nationally and changes Philadelphia’s direction, because America needs a new revolution — and it should start here.’” — former Gov. Ed Rendell

Why not engage Philly’s Klip Collective, which has projected sensory light shows onto City Hall, to do that here, where Paine’s pamphlets began their sweep of the colonies and spread a spirit of revolution? Why not brighten our night sky with Paine’s inspiring calls to take up civic arms, messages we should once again be exporting across the nation, like, We have it in our power to begin the world over again?

Another forward-thinking civic leader, a CEO, tells me he reached out to Philadelphia250 and wondered if the coming influx of visitors wasn’t an opportunity to sell people and businesses on relocating here.

He offered to put together a group of CEOs to serve as volunteer tour guides for just that purpose. Imagine you’re a New York businessperson on a jaunt to Philly for the 250th and Brian Roberts is chauffeuring your group through the city, selling its charm and convenience. Maybe you’d pull up stakes in overpriced and over-congested Manhattan? Alas, no one has yet gotten back to our would-be CEO volunteer. (Which may not be surprising, since business recruitment falls not to the 2026 team but to the City’s Commerce Department, which still doesn’t have a permanent director after Alba Martinez, a big supporter of 2026 planning, stepped down last May.)

Most promising, a group of next-gen business and civic leaders has formed to host a series of “Beyond 2026” public conversations. They had their first event at the Pennsylvania Society in New York, where, rather than simply schmooze and booze, they held a luncheon to talk about how to capitalize on 2026 and build a bigger and better city.

It was the brainchild of Cozen O’Connor managing director Joe Hill, who seems to have his hand in all matters of policy and power in Philly, and he recruited the afore-mentioned Angela Val; Comcast’s Michelle Singer; Sixers chief corporate affairs officer David Gould; and McKinsey’s JP Julien, an inclusive economic development consultant, for a panel that tossed around a commodity we’re too often lacking in: ideas. They were egged on by Future Standard founder and CEO and Citizen Media Group co-founder Michael Forman, who challenged the room of young and young-at-heart professionals to put something on the line. A lot was said, but there was a common theme: We need a change in attitude.

“Sometimes we let the perfect be the enemy of progress,” Gould said. “And I wish Philadelphia could be a little more welcoming to risk.”

Welcoming to risk. It’s funny to think of those guys — and they were all guys — huddled over that parchment at 7th and Market two and a half centuries ago. The original start-up founders, on our very own cobblestoned streets. As Isaacson chronicles in his book, Jefferson and Adams differed on inalienable versus unalienable rights. Adams prevailed — we are endowed with certain unalienable, or inherent, rights. While they tussled over a prefix, it’s easy to forget how much they had at stake. They were in the tiny minority; loyalists abounded around them. Had things gone another way, they’d have been found treasonous, likely put to death. And yet there they were, fixated on just the right word to fit their revolutionary call.

We’re here because of their welcoming of risk. And yet their attitude in the era of the Philly Shrug seems so bygone. Rendell even wrote a book about our post–20th century allergy to doing big things, titled A Nation of Wusses.

That’s why what we do this year, of all years, matters: It’s not just about quantifying economic impact, or maximizing visitors, or throwing grand parties, even though all those things are cool. It’s also about restoring a sense that Philly can once again do big things. That we can remind the nation of our founding values, even those that, at the time, might have been aspirational: tolerance, truth, equality. That we can let New York be the financial capital, as Rendell says, and let D.C. be the political capital — but take up our own mantle as “the history and democracy capital.” That we can get our swagger back.

And if that’s seen as arrogant or self-aggrandizing or somehow out of our reach? Well, then, as one modern-day revolutionary reminded us a few years ago: No one likes us, and we don’t care.

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